Dr. Michael Mann of Penn State testified before the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee about the critical issue of climate change, and the importance of building on the progress from the Paris Climate Conference.

Opening Statement transcript:

"Thank you, Congressman, and community members. I am honored to speak to you about this critical issue. My name is Michael Mann. I'm a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State. I spend my time teaching, advising students, during scientific research. Fundamentally, I am a climate scientist and I have spent much of my year with my head buried in climate data trying to seize out the signal of human caused climate change.

What is disconcerting to me and so many colleagues are these tools we have spent years developing, increasingly, are unnecessary because we can see climate change, the impact of climate change now playing out in real-time on our television screens. The impacts -- b food, water, health, national security, our economy -- climate change is creating -- taking a great toll. We've seen that in floods. The floods we have seen over the past year in Texas and in South Carolina. We see it in the devastating combination of sea level rise and more just active hurricanes -- destructive hurricanes which has led to calamities like superstorm sandy and what is now the perennial flooding of Miami beach. We see it in unprecedented drought, like that which continues to afflict California, doubling the area of wildfire, fire burning in the western U.S., and indeed, in the record heat we may see this weekend in phoenix, Arizona.

The signal of climate change is no longer subtle. It is obvious. And like the tip of the proverbial iceberg, further changes like the melting of the ice sheet to give us three feet of c rise by the end of the century, may be locked and simply from the carbon we have burned, from the warming in the pipeline due to the burning of fossil fuels. There are some tipping points. There are some we may not have crossed and can still avoid. It is still possible to avert catastrophic and potentially. Reversible changes in climate, but only by moving forward, building on the progress, and accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels towards a clean energy economy.

The stakes could not be greater. The future of our children and grandchildren literally hangs in the balance. No contrast could be more stark. We have the republican party whose standard bearer and a vast majority of their congressional representatives continue to deny that climate change exists. We have a democratic party that realizes that while we can debate the specifics of the worsening crisis, we cannot bury our heads in the sand and ignore the growing threat.

It is my hope that the Democratic Party will have a statement about putting a price on carbon -- it is my hope that the platform will it knowledge of the Obama Administration and promised to build on that legacy by defending the clean power plan against attacks by congressional republicans and by ensuring other EPA policies to reduce carbon emissions are kept in place. It is my hope the platform will acknowledge that we should hold on."